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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a